Today was the proper start of the event. At 7.30am, Gunner started playing his guitar for the morning wake up call. Showering today was a new experience – since we stay in dorm-styled areas, the toilets are sort of “public” or shared. Water was cold! Breakfast, then some ice breaker sessions which brought up some mighty interesting topics.
- NGOs are misguided ICT shoppers. They just decide when they get funding to go and become wired, and they don’t know their requirements and they just generally get whatever is pushed to them at the computer stores. This includes horrible operating systems.
- NGOs should try to learn from each other as they face similar situations usually; but they never do this practically as they prefer to just go it their own way.
- NGOs don’t like to pay for anything – they’d rather have everything for free, even if they were receiving funding. This isn’t a base case, but it happens often enough.
- In Uganda, any telecenters for ICT that are setup need the buy-in from men. Otherwise, the women can’t visit these public Internet access points, since their husbands think they’re going to go find other men!
The Migration & Adoption track started today, and we got to meet the participants for the first time; lots of interesting questions, with lots of varying technical levels. Some haven’t even used a FLOSS app while in Windows, while some are well setup and are in-between migrations, keeping logs and so on. What surprised me is the low percentage (~10%) of users that mentioned hardware being a barrier/problem – looks like Linux on low-end hardware isn’t such a big deal for NGOs.